Mike: open-source legal AI

120 points46 comments11 hours ago
jcfrei

I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp

reverius42

Presumably this is an issue for the commercial competitors too, but in light of the recent court ruling in United States v. Heppner that AI chatbots can break attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine, what kinds of things can this be safely used for? (I would assume you want to avoid sending anything with client-confidential information in it to a service provider like OpenAI or Anthropic.)

Potentially if used with a local LLM and not a service provider, this might protect attorney-client privilege?

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kostarelo

For a moment I thought it was some open-source LLM trained on legal. It's not, it's a web app wrapping major LLM providers and streamlining legal workflows, uploading documents, and having the LLM providers interact with them.

Cool project regardless!

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kernalix7

Self-hostable legal AI as open source is a useful direction in principle. Hard to tell how mature the actual implementation is though, the repo is pretty fresh and the marketing site is doing a lot of heavy lifting compared to what's in the code right now. Will be more interesting to revisit in a few weeks.

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trilogic

Why don´t you put a direct link that redirect users to some proprietary AI providers instead of making it look fancy. (If I ask whatever AI model will produce same outputs/forms, structured as you wish, and even locally). To qualify as some wrapper you need to add a layer of creativity by you on top of the existing ones.

typeofhuman

Behold the continued tradition of AI products having logos that look like buttholes.

syntaxing

I always wondered if Justin Kan’s Atrium closed door prematurely by just 2-3 years. It would have been cool to see a “technology” driven law firm and how it would have adjusted to LLMs.

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sandreas

Cool project. What a pity it's not mikefoss.com, would match the soundex of Mike Ross from suits even better ;-)

re_spond

Cool initiative. Is this fully separate from "legal Mike", the Dutch company that provides a similar solution, https://legalmike.ai/product/ ?

That may be confusing on the naming.

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oliwary

The name is really clever given that the character in Suits is called Mike Ross. :)

scosman

2 commits, 8 hours old....

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campers

Interested to try it out! Some feedback on the homepage there's nothing above the fold, or directly below that says its a Legal AI platform. I would like a legal AI tool, but I'm not familiar with the space don't know what Harvey or Legora are. It was only the hackernews title "Mike: open-source legal AI" that gave the context.

wps

This website is actually gorgeous. What do you call this style?

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ebipaul5194

Is it safe to share details with AI for case points what happened when data is breached. Victims name will be reviled right?

albertgoeswoof

How does this work with docx files? The screenshots only show pdfs?

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higginsniggins

Beautiful website.

kleiba2

I'm so tired of having to sign up to some new service even just to try it out.

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voidUpdate

Because using LLMs for legal work has never gone wrong, and LLMs have never cited completely hallucinated cases